Evie stays for aftercare a few days a week and the kids are grouped by a few age groups into one room. Evie's in with quite a few older kids. One day last week, the aftercare teacher told me that the kids had been running around trying to scare each other, saying they were the "boogey man". There was shrieking and running, apparently, but it was all over by the time I got there. Ms. Deborah said that at one point during this, Evie came up to her. Ms. Deborah asked, "Are you scared, Evie?" Evie answered, "No. It's just peoples."
Last night, Evie went to Granna's for a while while Seth and I did some things around the house and saw a movie. One of the things Evie and Granna did was watch a couple of Berenstain Bears cartoons - Evie has all my old Berenstain Bear books and she loves them, and we watch the cartoon at home sometimes too. This cartoon included a sequence where the cubs were going into a scary cave. One of the cubs posited that there might be a monster in the cave, but it turns out to just be a goat. Uncle Ryan called Granna not long after that scene and Evie insisted that "Evie talk" and told Ryan several times, "Not a monster in the cave. Just a goat." Ryan texted me and said he'd talked to Evie for 15 minutes and thought it was adorable.
I have to say, I'm very surprised and impressed by Evie's bravery. She used to be a little shy, but she has never been scared of much. I expected her to be a little afraid of some of the stories we read or the movies we see (I mean, my niece Addie was afraid of the bees in "Winnie the Pooh") or the water going down the drain in the bathtub, but no. She just handles things very practically. Even things like being with a lot of people she doesn't know - like today we went out with some folks after church and she didn't seem uncertain about that, or last week when we went out with Jimmy and Connie (my dad's cousin and wife) to dinner and Evie gave hugs to everyone before we left, even though for most of the people there, it was her first time to meet them. She's gotten very friendly and very brave.
I am also impressed at her imagination. She has been playing with the bitty babies that Grandma Jeanne gave her for Christmas. An aside here: the bitty babies are twins with blonde hair and Kathy at first thought it would be nice to name them James and Jane (my grandfather and his twin sister). Then she decided that it would be better for Evie to give them names herself, but I thought the idea was so sweet, and since Evie seems to favor taking care of the boy, I can't help but think about how that would be James. Anyway, Evie has enjoyed being a little Mama for her babies. She makes them scrambled eggs in her play kitchen, takes them to go potty, puts them to bed. Granna said that last night Evie wanted to make playdoh dinosaurs and then the dinosaur bit Granna's cheek and Evie's nose so it had to go to time out. I love these little stories she's coming up with.
And she's starting demonstrating prediction skills. We watched "Benji" for the first time on Friday, and there is a sequence that shows Benji's routine, how he leaves his house, runs his course through the neighborhood to the different people he has become attached, and then back home. Later, when Benji is running his routine again, Evie predicted, "Benji going home." And he was. She's very good at picking up sequences of events. She can even tell me which streets to turn on to get home from her school.
We are also one step closer to being potty trained. On Friday when she got home from school, sort of on a whim, I just decided it was time to put on underwear instead of a pull up. I told her that wearing underwear meant that if she went potty in her pants it would get on her clothes, a point that was driven home when she went off in a corner and then announced, "I peeing!" She was a little unsettled though not overly so by the fact that her pants were now wet and we have been wearing underwear at home for the rest of the weekend. She has tomorrow off from school so we'll have all day tomorrow and I think I may just go ahead and send several changes of clothes with her to school on Tuesday and see if it takes. She's growing up!
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